Monthly Update: March, 2023

 

Content warning:  The first four paragraphs are COVID-19 related and my thoughts about the last three years.  If you want to skip that part and just read about video games, skip down to the paragraph that starts: "Most importantly..."

Well, it's now been three years since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, or at least it will be on Saturday, March 11th.  It is a strange thing to think about.  Three years ago at this time we already knew that this virus was spreading at an alarming rate in China and Italy, and beginning to gain traction in the United States.  Conklederp and I flew down to Northern California to go to our friend's wedding in San Francisco and I remember seeing a woman being pulled aside at the airport and asked to remove her mask by security and genuinely wondering if we should be traveling with masks, but we had brought Clorox wipes in a ziplock bag to wipe down our seatbelts and trays on the plane and I am sure we got looks as we cleaned our seats.  We were actually supposed to go to the wedding with both DK and his wife (who earned her PhD. in immunology) but their oldest had just come down with a cold and his wife was starting to not feel well so she stayed behind.  We also later realized that "that" ship was just off the San Francisco coast, visible from our drive to/from the Bay Area.   It is crazy thinking that three days after we got back from California, on Wednesday, March 11th, the WHO would declare COVID-19 a global pandemic.  As of Thursday, March 2nd, a reported 6.8 million (6,859,093) people have died, and still, in the United States, a weekly average of 469 people are still dying from COVID-19 and COVID-19-related infections every day.  At least we are not back in January 2021 when the average daily death count was in the 3,000+ in the US alone.

I know that we are in a significantly different place right now. I personally have received my COVID-19 vaccines and all available boosters.  I still practice social distancing.  I still wear a mask when I go inside grocery stores.  A couple weeks ago Conklederp, Himo, Folly, and I did our first escape room since February 1, 2020.  We still have not gone out to see a movie in a theatre since February 24th, but part of that is also that we would need to have a babysitter for The Squire, and I think both Conklederp and I are still not comfortable with going into an enclosed space the size of a movie theatre.  And for all of the precautions that we have taken these last three years.  How during the start I would wear both a mask and gloves when going inside any place that was not our house.  How, after I had to go back into our office in July 2020, which also had me going inside a couple of businesses for my job, I would strip out of my clothes in our kitchen, just inside our front door, and immediately throw those clothes in the washing machine before greeting Conklederp; similar to the precautions I took when I was working at an assisted living facility and we had a Norovirus outbreak for about a month.  Both Conklederp nor I have not yet had a positive test for COVID-19, although we both acknowledge that we could have contracted it and just been asymptomatic at some point.  We have gotten colds though, each of us 2-3 times since July 2022, and each time we have tested negative multiple times.

I bring all of this up for a couple of reasons. First, again because it has now been three years since March 2020.  I have reread articles I wrote during 2020 and rewatched a couple YouTube videos put out in that first handful of months, just thinking about, well, literally everything.  There were the countless videos of people cheering hospital staff as they finished their shifts.  There were the videos of people performing music from the isolation of their own homes for their neighbors.  There was that guy who told everyone to repackage, wash all their groceries, and to leave their food outside for like a day or two (ignoring the fact that ice cream and milk existed apparently).  There were the instructional videos on how to properly don and doff your mask.  Thinking back on all of the reasons for this media being made at that specific time feel a bit like a fever dream, that if I do not think too hard that a lot feels the same as it did in March 2019.  And then I put on my mask to go into a grocery store.

I do get a little emotional thinking about this, about all of the uncertainties regarding transmission and how best to keep ourselves and the people around us safe.  Secondly, Conklederp and I are doing paperwork to have The Squire attend preschool in the fall and are coming to terms with him coming into contact with a lot of kids (~16/day) on a couple-days-a-week basis.  I know that "kids get sick" as I have worked in preschools and elementary schools before, often getting sick my first week that school started.  It is just that the last three years have changed the way that both Conklederp and I approach things now, especially with our soon-to-be three-year-old attending preschool later this year.

This was not originally the Monthly Update I had planned on posting as there is stuff related to video games that I had wanted to write about, but then I fell into an introspective rabbit hole and this is what came out.  But apart from COVID, there is some game-related content.

Most importantly is that the 3DS and Wii U eShops are closing on Monday, March 27th.  We have talked about it here although at the time a final closing date had not been set.  But the big footnote to "closing" is that it is the last day you can make purchases but not the last day you can download games you have already purchased.  So for the 3DS, if you are waiting for that 1 TB mini SD card to arrive from Newegg and it is delivered on the 28th, you can still load up the memory on your 3DS and respective memory card "for the foreseeable future" with games you have already purchased.  I have heard at least one sale from Thunderful (Steamworld and Hello Kitty games in the EU) will go live next week, and that a near month-long sale for the Japan eShop from Atlus was canceled for speculative reasons.  I am still checking my 3DS and Wii U respective eShops every couple of days but maybe now that we are in March and heading into the final stretch there will be something more substantial than shovelware.

On the Switch, after finishing Bayonetta 3, I decided to play LIVE A LIVE (however you pronounce LIVE) while Conklederp is awake so she can follow along, and when she's asleep or streaming a show I will play Theatrhythm Final Bar Line (First Impressions incoming) and have been having fun with this new iteration of the series.  I will likely be writing a Game EXP article for LIVE A LIVE by the end of the month.

And speaking of the end of the month, this month will be the final group of games from Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1, the series I started back in October at the time March felt so far away, but now feels like I only started a short while ago.  I could imagine doing something similar with the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection, but I would need to invest more than 10 minutes per game, especially with Crystalis which would probably be closer to 15 hours for me because of how slow I tend to play games.  I do like the idea of going through a collection of games though and the Atari Collection was a fun way of going about it.  I may only have time to do one large collection per year with the amount of time required for each game and article, so maybe this next October I will have something new that I spent the summer working on (apart from actual work).

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
The Wine of Venus, The Essence of Our Hope